LTPHarry

So, the day I found out that ITV had commissioned this special, I thought it was a complete joke. Is ITV that desperate for Christmas commissions that it resorts to showing nothing but short-form portrait content on television? We already see enough of that, ITV!

Then came the fact that this special is two hours long (inc. Ads) and aired on Christmas Eve. At this point, it shows that ITV has INDEED run out of programs to show during Christmas - and yet this happened to win out in its timeslot.

I completely refused to watch it because I was hoping that ITV would never recommission another one of these specials for the following Christmas. I did see a repeat broadcast of it the following week, but only for a few seconds, and that was enough.

The special is narrated by Joel Dommett (it seems that he's so desperate for work if the production company hired him to narrate over the footage), and it shows a ranking of TikTok videos and, through the use of AI (no surprise there), how much the content creators can earn. There's nothing else to mention here because all it has going for is exactly what the special's title says.

The fact that this special is on ITV1 instead of the Gen-Z pandering ITV2 explains more than it should, and the fact is, why are we watching random TikTok videos on TV? Sure, there have been YouTube television shows that fulfill the same purpose, but those had a lot more variety than the dances and pointless fodder TikTok has on its entire site. In all honesty, I don't see the appeal in short-form content; it's boring, repetitive, and completely diminishes your brain with rotting content as disgusting as mouldy bread.

To end it off, ITV is the absolute worst when it comes to modern Christmas schedules, and this special certainly is the best example of this, alongside non-stop Good Morning Britain, Lorraine, This Morning, and Loose Women. No wonder everyone resorts to streaming services to watch what they want unless it's purged from the service. (and no, their dumpster fire of a service named "ITVX" does not count!) This is one of the worst specials I have ever seen, and I hope never to talk about it again. Shame on you, ITV, and shame on you, Minnow Films. You certainly can do better than that.

U&Dave has a new commission on their hands, and from the depths of Richard Bacon, he's brought along a show where the audience must not laugh or make a single sound, but this proves to be difficult when you've got stand-up comedians who you're familiar with on every other original show on this channel. The whole audience has £250,000 up for grabs, but it's usually whittled down to £10,000 or lower.

For once, this isn't a panel show. But just because it's not part of an oversaturated genre means it's going to be good. This show sucks. It's uninspired, it's incredibly boring, and overall, it overimplies shock value to the point it has very little meaning. It feels like a heavily watered-down Japanese game show from the whole concept alone.

Dermot O'Leary is the presenter, and he feels completely unfit for a show like this; he's incredibly wooden and doesn't do anything noteworthy. He feels just as bored as the viewers watching, and I can't blame him there. It just feels like his agent thought this would be perfectly suited, and he had to go by the guidelines. I would say a comedian would be better suited, because it IS U&Dave, after all. Jimmy Carr? Wait... he already hosts a similar show to this one (Last One Laughing, based on a Japanese series).

And from Episode 1 alone, you have a severely bad contestant, a naked woman who serves no purpose other than to provide nudity for the sake of nudity, plenty of swearing (Yes, even Dermot drops an F-bomb, which you know its bad when that's the only thing I can say about him that he did in the whole first episode) and comedians who feel like they would be better off on another show than this one.

The show's production values feel CHEAP, there's little of anything that wides my eyes to say that "hey, this is a comedy show!" Even the logo feels cheaply done.

Overall, this show certainly feels silent, and does that make it golden? No, it doesn't! Richard Bacon provides yet another U&Dave original that completely fails, and it's sad because this format could have been much more entertaining. Unsurprisingly, the show got the axe after one series, so even to those who enjoyed this show, all they're gonna do is forget about it after a year or so. And that pretty much summons up the appeal of these low-effort comedy shows in a nutshell.

So, game shows come thick and thin; many flops have existed, and everybody forgets about them. Remember Reflex? Remember Draw It? Remember That Puppet Game Show? Neither do I.

Don't Scare the Hare is one of the best examples of this, not only because its theme and budget didn't fit prime-time weekend television but because it was deceptively advertised. Adverts stated that the Easter Bunny had competition, which made it feel like a one-off, but that was not the case. It was a one-series wonder that was so poorly received that its last three episodes were burned off months later!

Jason Bradbury, who we know from Channel 5's The Gadget Show, is your presenter. He does not do a good job, mainly because his assistant is an animatronic bunny rabbit! The legendary Sue Perkins is the announcer and occasionally engages in some snarky humour.

And as for your contestants, they're adults, not kids, as you would think to believe. They try not to scare the hare by playing a bunch of dumb minigames that wouldn't pass off at somewhere like a fairground. The pyrotechnics just prove that most of the show's budget went into making the special effects fancy.

Overall, this show would have worked very well on CBeebies with kid contestants, not BBC One. Maybe that could explain why this show was made - to huddle the family together on their sofa, and yet that didn't work! And all this ended up being was another flopped concept from Endemol.